Talk:Working time

Citations

Currently, citation five (bottom of first paragraph of "South Korea and Japan") does not reinforce the claim that "Until legislation in 2004 that virtually abolished the six-day workweek in large corporations known as "jaebol", South Korea was the only country in the OECD that worked Saturdays." It was written in 2001, so to use it to cite that sentence seems misleading. 75.8.36.64 (talk) 14:46, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Neither of citations 4 and 5 in any way support the assertions made in the paragraph. In each case, the articles explicitly state that the four hour work week being adopted is still the 40 hour workweek (though a 36-hour week is discussed as a distinct minority) and neither article says anything about "increas[ing] consumption" or "invigorat[ing] the economy" - arguably specious goven the French experience with enforced reductions in employment hours per year, nor do they say anything about "improv[ing] worker's level of education" or health or, and I have no idea where this one came from, "help[ing] the environment with less carbon-related emissions". A passage on the trend toward adopting a four day work week is certainly appropriate and the two cited articles are good source material, but the claims listed should either be accurately sourced or dropped entirely. -- Fletch 22:24, 07 March 2010

Investment banker working time

I think the investment banker working time is incorrect. This suggests that an investment banker works 13-14 hours a day, every single day of the year - christmas and sundays included. Can someone check to see if this is a joke - the citation leads nowhere to confirm. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.161.65.108 (talk) 06:53, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't know what source was used for this specific statement, but it appears to be reasonably accurate, based on sources like this. Investment bankers average around 100 hours a week, and (in the US, at least) get no vacation time. If the markets are open, then they're working; when the markets are closed, they're preparing for the markets to open again. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:51, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Pre-civilization Work Hours

I'm no expert (and am thus soliciting the efforts of others who might be reading), but I've always learned, in introductory and middle-level Anthropology courses and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel that agriculture and early civilization drastically increased work hours for average individuals because of drastically increased social hierarchy -- elites who perform no truly productive role like chiefs, kings, bureaucrats, and soldiers still had to be fed. Only relatively recently, to my understanding, have some countries (arguably the elites in a globalized economy) achieved leisure levels comparable to people in a state of nature. Anyone know of any good public domain/internet anthropology texts that discuss this? 65.117.234.99 (talk) 17:31, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Communists Countries

Somehow people forgot to mention that in former communist countries (before 1990), people worked up to 2 pm and then went home. That's 6 hours per day, or 30 hours per week.

The main reason for this is that you didn't need to apply for jobs, but jobs were always available (because of central planification, the government had years to create your job). If you didn't have one, the government would have failed (which was an embarrasment), so as you can guess, your position would be created immediatly, even if you had nothing to do there for several months (something that also happens on our "capitalist" companies).

The important thing was that the amount of unemployment was always zero by definition, but on the other hand, if you wanted to switch jobs, or if you were fired or simply quit, well, you would have no where to go, because there is only one employer... oops!

This of course means you can never have an argument with your boss, which means a very political organization (in both senses of the word). You have to agree with whatever stupid idea your boss has, and in case you show any doubt, you could simply be left wandering the streets (but remember that selling candy in the streets is a mayor offense). Well on most countries it is an offense anyway.

Having your own restaurant? No, you can't do that!

Exporting goods? No, you can't do that! This is very idiotic, because they sold gas through a pipeline. I guess they thought it was a very good idea so that they could cut the gas supply in case they needed to excert some pressure, but on the other hand we know that developed countries are in short supply of energy...

So in short, increase in productivity in capitalist countries make people have more spare time (or work harder and have more unemployment), so most european nations have reduced the hours worked per week. This means the lower end jobs that require les knowledge and have less value added go to less developed countries, freeing people to study (which usually the government takes care of in the form of subsidies: tuition + housing costs), which means a lot more people with education in the next decade, which means increased productivity and so on.

POV

Well, there's a lot of POV in this article. Fewer people working longer hours can be discussed without using words like 'disturbing'.

Charles Matthews 09:33, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

And while we're talking about POV, why is there such a lengthy description of the US labour situation in relation to everyone else? Does everyone in the world live in the US? I don't think so. In fact, only 5 per cent of people live in the US. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.249.62.29 (talk) 12:31, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

True, but 20% of the money. 65.167.146.130 (talk) 16:52, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

This article isn't about money. It's about working time. And the guy above is making a legitimate point about this article being too focused on the U.S. Maybe we should try to get a consensus on reducing the U.S. section. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.5.248.244 (talk) 07:05, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

I trimmed the US section a bit, both for the sake of shortening it and for eliminating a decided political bias against US labor policy. The section still is long, though, and still contains a lot of political discussion that I'm not sure is appropriate. I encourage others to edit this section further. We might also considering moving all of this information on the history of US work hours to someplace else and focusing instead on current policy, typical hours, full-time vs part-time, and things like overtime pay, which I do believe are relevant. Everything said, I personally feel long-ish United States sections can be valid, even in articles such as this, so long as the information itself is relevant. It's a huge population, far and away the largest of any English-speaking country in the world. If we ranked California, I think it alone would rank 4th on the list, between South Africa and Canada. And this *is* the English-speaking Wikipedia. But in this case, no, I don't think we need to have a political treatise on the state of the American work week since NSH-68. Mxheil (talk) 17:44, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Graphic source

What is the source for the working time hours graphic/data? "OECD" isn't precise enough. Rd232 10:51, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

The source for this graph is pg. 84 of the 2004 version of OECD in Figures. (I just found it.) http://213.253.134.43/oecd/pdfs/browseit/0104071E.PDF 17:34 CST, 16 April 2007 (UIC).

I'm taking it with a grain of salt. 1328 hours a year in Norway? Maybe that's just offshore people who work 14 days straight and then have 3-4 weeks off? In my branch it's 1717.5 hrs, and I thought that was pretty standard. Hordaland 03:43, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Policy

Just a lurker here can someone please explain why This policy is controversial among economists. ~Thor

Overtime

It would be interesting to find out what states do double-time after 60 hours - I'm... familiar, I guess, with federal labor laws, but not so much with the specifics on every state. I know California has some pretty progressive labor laws, with double-time provisions, but I don't know what they are off hand. It'd be interesting to know how prevalent some of the more progressive laws (like double-time) are. Tel Janin 23:21, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

I've been under the impression that you are not exempt from overtime laws simply for being a salaried employee. I thought there were two classes of jobs, exempt and non-exempt, with the exempt being managers and a few other positions. Anyone out there know more than I? Jrtf83 (talk) 20:11, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Random Thoughts

Just thinking... if the workers left the farmwork because work in the city was more regular, then the farmers were left without a workforce. Therefore the farmers must have been less productive. If the farmers were less productive, then to keep the same standard of living they would have had to raise their prices. However, the workers in the city had to buy their food now, but the prices had gone up and therefore the only option they had was to work longer hours to earn more money to pay for the food that they could have had either for free or at a reduced price or at the previous price, if they hadn't left the farm!

Actually, due to mechanization and other technological advancements, far less human labor is required to produce the same amount of food as in the past. In terms of hours of human labor, food is a lot cheaper now than it used to be, whether you work on the farm or in the city. -- Beland 04:20, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

--- I think it was the other way around. People left the farm because the constant improvements in how the labor is done, so that with fewer people you could feed more people. This meant less return for farmers because fewer farmers with fewer lands could feed the entire population, and that explains why food was getting cheaper while farmers were getting poorer. This went on, with improvement after improvement until 2007, when things turned around, because of biofuels. Now the food is getting more expensive, but the amount of work continues to get reduced.

Cities were places where artisans gathered to to produce and learn their arts. The first cities were called universities because of that.

When people was not needed in the farms, they migrated to the cities. But in the cities the same phenomenon was happening, so all the goods made required just a small group of people to produce, the rest has to study or do some low wage, underemployment.

Capitalist countries in the decade of 1930's had 30% of unemployment, and people starved on the streets. The goverments had to employ people in things that at that time were considered waste, but now are considered the basis of our civilization, like building roads.

Also the social security was invented. We never like other people taking a big part of our production, but if you think about it, it is great. The goverment takes 1/3 or even 1/2 of your income, if you work, but it gives you back the same (and sometimes several times more) if you don't work, which means jobs have to be nice and have decent hours, or else you could resign, go home take a beer, watch TV, program the next Linux, etc.

It means employers no longer are in control, and also, it means you can expect jobs to be well paid (since at least they should pay more than the goverment pays for staying at home). So low wages are no longer possible and working conditions must be better than the alternative: working at home.

There is not a line of people wating for your job. That's incredibly good. It means you are in control now. That's a way to make jobs more democratic. Can it get better? I mean despite the fact that people think (wrongly) that the money the government gets is getting out of their wallet, while in fact it is getting out of the companies.

Some people complain that companies prefer to go to offer jobs to underdeveloped countries. Good! I think that's awsome, because if they really can do that, it means underdeveloped people can do that, and of course you don't want to have such a job. It is better to study and get a better job for something that has real added value.

--- It is interesting that the medical profession always bemoans the long hours they have to work due to being 'short staffed', but these same organisations deliberatly restrict the number of qualified staff that are produced each year, so they only have themselves to blame.

Underemployment?

Could somebody please explain this:

When working time is too short, this represents underemployment of labor and human capital. Individuals within such a society will tend, therefore, to do less work than they are capable of, and may receive correspondingly low compensation.

If an individual is working less hours in one day, how does that lead to what seems to be described above as exhaustion and/or laziness, or something psychological? It just does not make sense, at least when explained in that way.

I interpret the passage as saying that if people, on average, work fewer hours, they will, on average, earn less money. It does not have anything to do with laziness. -- Beland 05:04, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

I re-worded this part of the article to make it clearer. -- Beland

Conflicting data

In the United States, by contrast, working time has actually been increasing.

This claim does have a reference - a web page that cites another work. However, the data elsewhere on the page shows an average of 1949 hours per worker in 1987, and 1777 in 2004. This represents a decrease. This conflict needs to be resolved, either by changing the claim to say that working time in the U.S. is fluctuating rather than monotonically changing, or working on the references to get the original data or perhaps more data or more analysts' perspectives. -- Beland 06:07, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the "AVERAGE WEEKLY HOURS OF PRODUCTION WORKERS" was between 38 and 39 in 1964 while in 2005 it was between 33 and 34. Certainly a decrease. See http://www.bls.gov/data/home.htm to pull up the data for yourself.--71.2.147.254 01:51, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

The database from the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) http://www.ggdc.net/index-dseries.html supports the claim, that average working hours per employee in the U.S. are actually decreasing --Michael Petersen 18:36, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

It should be noted that the hours-per-week-per-worker figure is not perfect, as representation of the situation or as a clearly defined statistic. Varying methodology produces widely varying numbers. It can be compromised, say, if large sectors of an economy shift to illegal immigrants, who are harder to track. As an average, it does not make distinctions between different class of workers. Nor does it account for fluctuations in the portion of the population in the workforce - higher percentage means less time spent with family, etc. What I'm trying to say is -- The article would do well not to draw broad conclusions from that single statistic. So maybe it should be gutted until someone can do better research. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.17.58.129 (talk) 23:36, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Working time in the antiquity?

It would be interesting if someone could find data about working time in the antique civilisations and in neolithicum. I have seen a statement that non-industrialised societies usually have much shorter working hours than we have in the industrialised world. Unfortunately I have given the book with that statement away, and I have forgotten both title and author. It was a German edition of an American or English study of time perception in different cultures. Could anyone help out there? Mlewan 14:47, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Found it. It is "A Geography of Time, The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently" by Robert V. Levine. Mlewan 12:00, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Now I am less certain about that source. It talks about the "Sandwich Islands". However, it is not clear if it means "Hawaii" (in which case the statement is probably wrong), or "South_Sandwich_Islands", which apparently lacks native population. Well, I leave the statement as is, for the time being, and see if someone can clarify it. Mlewan 12:08, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Salaried Employees

The whole section about salaried employees not being eligible for overtime pay is incorrect. Whether an employee is salaried or not they are still eligible for overtime pay unless they are exempt under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). There are three exemptions: Executive, Administrative and Professional. Only those that fall under one of these exemptions will not receive overtime pay. Many salaried workers are not exempt from the FLSA and do in fact receive overtime pay. The burden of proof is on the employer to show that an employee is exempt from the FLSA and the burden is not easily met. Snikolao 05:26, 4 December 2006 (UTC) Shane

Definition of "Work Hours Over History" seems nebulous, at best

How can the concept of "work hours" be clearly defined, when the nature of "work" has varied drastically over centuries? Is holding a religious mass "work"? Is driving a team of horses while it pulls a wagon to market work? What if the person "driving" the team falls asleep, and the team follows the road anyway? Is it still work? Is driving a car work? Is breaking rocks as a prisoner "work"? Is singing in a choir "work", or is it leisure?

Giving that a lot of the things that slaves or peasants (the vast majority of people in many societies) did were unpaid or underpaid labour, it's not so simple to define work as "actions for hire".

What's more, the amount of "work done" probably varies less by history than by climate; the Inuit spend more of their days gathering and maintaining resources for survival than, say, the natives of the Pacific Islands, because it simply takes more work to survive in a colder climate. Both cultures fish: but the Inuit first have to cut holes deep in the ice to get to the fish. The Inuit also need to first aqquire and wear snow goggles, parkas, and other survival gear: the Pacific Islanders don't need to do anything special to stay warm. If you need fewer material possessions to live, you can do less work and still survive. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.254.142.195 (talk) 18:30, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Merge proposal

I've added a new category Category:Employment classifications. I think with some tweaking of focus on the subjects they are best left as separate. This page about demographics, sociology, political history the others with more of a focus on workplace law in respective countries. Grumpyyoungman01 (talk) 22:47, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Thoughts on the IMPORTANCE section

STATEMENT:Working time is a quantity that can be measured for an individual or, in the aggregate, for a society.

This is incorrect.

In a society based on a social production process, the measurement of working time must also be social. This is because with a social production process each individual performs only one (or two) of the hundreds (perhaps, hundreds of thousands) of the steps required to satisfy even a single one his or her material and non-material needs. For this reason, the total number of hours of work performed within a nation, and, increasingly, the whole group of nations composing global society, is not a simple aggregate of the hours of work performed by the individuals who belong to it.

A trucker, no matter how many hours she works, could not subsist on her work were she not attached to the larger body of social production capable of providing all the things she cannot provide directly by her labor.

It is the contradiction between hours of work, which can only be provided by each individual separately, and the final satisfaction of their individual needs, which can only be provided by the sum hours of work of all individuals taken together.

The trucker is trapped in circumstances from which she cannot escape by dint of work. She is a mere cog in a greater machine, incapable of subsisting by her own efforts, her individual activity subordinated to the logic of society’s sum total activity. This unique state of absolute dependence is peculiar to social production at a certain stage of its development; it is the tyranny which lords over the activity of the individual, transforming the very exercise of her human capacities into the repetitious, soul shattering, tedium characteristic of this stage of social production.

Replace with: “In a society founded on social production, working time is the sum quantity of time society spends on producing the material and non-material economic requirements of human life.”

Next, we have to separate the legally established work time, from the actual work time:

The legally established work time varies by nation and changes within each nation over time, as social convention and political demand dictates. The legally established work time may or may not be consistent with the actual work time performed, on average, by individuals.

ADD: “The legally established work time varies by country, and may, or, may not, be consistent with the actual number of hours individuals actually work. Moreover, methods for establishing the legal work time vary."

Beyond this, we have to separate both the legally established work time and the actual number of hours individuals work from the minimum number of hours materially required by a society, which is determined by the productivity, efficiency, and sum influences of cultural/historical development. There will be more on this later.

STATEMENT: In the latter case, a 40-hour workweek would imply that employed individuals within the society, on average, worked 40 hours per week. Most often, the concern of sociologists and policy-makers focuses on the aggregate variables.

From the above, we can see that the formulation here is entirely inadequate. Is the writer speaking of the actual number of hours worked on average by individuals; the legally established maximum hours of work they can be compelled to work, as determined by law; or the materially required average minimum number of hours each individuals must work in order to reproduce the social conditions of their existence?

Drop it entirely.

STATEMENT: If an individual works 60 hours per week, it could simply mean that he or she is enthusiastic about his or her job, not a cause for concern.

In any case, how would this concern us? Who would consider it a matter of policy that someone wishes to work him/her self to death for the sheer joy of it? Why include it?

Drop it.

STATEMENT: However, if long workweeks become the norm in a society, these hours almost certainly are not voluntary, and it represents a drought of leisure and a threat to public health.

Why must the author limit this problem to “long workweeks?” How are we to distinguish a normal workweek from a “long” workweek? For the sake of argument, let us assume the measuring stick is the point where, “hours almost certainly are not voluntary.”

If this is the 60th hour of work, so be it.

If, on the other hand, it is the first hour, so be that, as well.

So, If we assume all work is involuntary – which is why we demand pay to perform it – it becomes clear the problem the length of the workweek poses to us is not, “a drought of leisure [or] a threat to public health,” but the involuntary character of work itself – that it comprises a period of time, more or less long, when we are unable to do those things we prefer to do with our lives and our productive human capacities.

It should, therefore, be stated this way: “The length of the work week is a matter of social concern because its length determines how great a portion of our lives will be spent involuntarily engaged, rather than in the voluntary exercise of our humanity, and the enjoyment produced by that exercise.”

Or, if that is too, “French,” for you, this: “Since work is an involuntary act, the length of the workweek is important because people should not have to work more than is absolutely necessary.”

STATEMENT: ''Each society’s definition of the ideal workweek differs, but most industrialized nations place this value between 30 and 40 hours per week, during non-vacation time, with between 3 and 5 weeks of (usually paid) vacation[citation needed].

Now this is absolute nonsense:

First, we are not talking about “society’s” ideal work week, are we? I think we can agree that work is, by definition, not an ideal, no matter its length, but a necessity imposed by nature – else, how would there be the science of economics? Moreover, many of “society’s” members are quite happy to avoid work whenever possible, and, where possible, to have others perform work on their behalf. This is their “ideal.”

Second, as the author indicates in the next section of the sentence, it is not the “ideal” length of the work week which is of concern to this entry, but the legally mandated maximum length of that period in most nations.

REPLACE WITH:”Most industrialized nations legally mandate a maximum work week length of between 30 and 40 hours per week, and, require 3 to 5 weeks per year of vacation.”

STATEMENT: If the work week is too short compared to that society's ideal, then the society suffers from underemployment of labor and human capital. All else being equal, this will tend to result in lower real incomes and a lower standard of living than what could be had with a longer work week in the same society.

Again, this is nonsense. The critical fact is if the work week is too short then society does not eat! Its members have no place to lay their heads. Its members walk around buck naked, between towns on shoeless feet!

The work week cannot fall below a certain minimum number of hours required to produce the basic material conditions of its standard of living. It is only after this that we can speak of under-employment of labor and capital, i.e. it is only after this can we speak of re-production of these basic conditions on a larger scale, as a larger population, and greater wants, require.

But, society is not static. Nor are the methods of production and re-production of the basic material conditions of its standard of living. If today, it takes 20 workers 200 hours to complete a house, tomorrow improvement of methods of work, and less labor intensive materials, allow this same house to be built in only 180 hours.

TO REPLACE THIS: “The actual hours of work per week cannot fall below a certain minimum without compromising a nation’s ability to produce the basic material standards of living, and to re-produce these same conditions as its population and wants grows.”

STATEMENT: In contrast, a work week that is too long will result in more material goods at the cost of stress-related health problems as well as a drought of leisure.

Here, in this sentence, is the central fallacy of this economics: To work too little is to produce insufficiently for a nation’s needs. But, work too long and what happens? People get stressed out, and, spend too little time resting. Such is the stupidity of political-economy, which can see only the mounting pile of produced goods, yet never asks itself who will consume these goods.

But, we know all too well what happens in that case: The Great Depression. What we don’t know is why this event has not recurred since the end of World War II. This is because in this entry all work is treated, surreptitiously, as material goods producing work.

What of work performed by those employed by government in the United States? Work is performed on its behalf which never produces a single material good required to maintain the living standards of that country – tax collectors, yes; agricultural subsidy distributors, yes; military armaments suppliers, yes – but, no material goods of value to the standard of living of the society.

Further, work can be expended in a raft of non-governmental, non-material goods producing endeavors: nail salons, massage therapy shops, legal consultations, credit company call centers, collection agencies, security guards, directors of personnel, advertising, etc. – to name just a few.

What would really be an advance here is to determine what, if any, effect the existence of a large number of work hours devoted to such endeavors cost society – beyond making its members feel stressed out.

To answer this we must ask: How many shoes does a lawyer produce? How many heads of lettuce does a massage therapist grow? How many cars does a director of personnel assemble? How many houses are built by tax collectors?

The answer to each question is, of course, Zero; yet, each of these non-goods producing members of society needs each of these products. To produce in sufficient quantities the requisite material goods to clothe, feed, transport, and house each of these individuals requires so much additional time the remaining members of society must spend at work producing material goods – in return, of course, for massages, legal advice, morale boosting company events, and … nothing – since the tax man gives nothing back to society for the portion he takes.

So we should replace the above entry with this one:”If the minimum number of hours a nation works is determined by the material requirements of its standard of living by contrast there is no upper limit on the number of hours, provided a certain minimum, and ever increasing, number of individuals remain completely superfluous to the satisfaction of those material requirements. The additional hours of work required to materially support these unproductively employed members are simply added to work time of those productively employed in the society.”

But, we are not finished yet:

ALSO ADD:''“Given the progressive improvement in the productivity of a nation, and its efficiency in the employment of labor, at a certain point the productive employment of an increasing portion of its members becomes impossible within a given length of the work week. In such cases, these superfluous members must be employed unproductively, or the actual average work time must be reduced. Absent one of these solutions economic collapse is likely.”

STATEMENT: Furthermore, children are likely to receive less attention from overworked parents, and childrearing is likely to be subjectively worse.

This assertion is not at all demonstrated by the facts presented. Instead, what the writer seeks is to endow his reader with a sense of pity for two income families. If the material requirements of society required latchkey kids, or even children to be engaged in production beside their parents, what would it matter that it stings the sensibilities of child welfare activists? The child works, or the family starves!

Drop it.

STATEMENT: The exact ways in which excessive workweeks affect culture, public health, and education are debated, but the existence of such a danger is undisputed.

But, in fact, we do know how an excessively long work week affects these things, at least insofar as the United States is concerned. We have all the experience of the Great Depression, and all the years following, to tell us:

1. Absent a reduction in the work week the production process itself is thrown into crisis. An increasing mass of individuals become superfluous to social production. Unemployment rises, government revenue fall, trade and commerce decline.

2. These superfluous individuals demand government, “Do something!” For the simple reason the great mass of them cannot survive without work.

3. In response government undertakes to inflate economic activity through the judicious use of fiscal and monetary policy – preferring to adopt this strategy, rather the more obvious solution – vociferously argued for by many people – of reducing the maximum number of hours considered a normal work week.

4. That this was not an inevitable development, but, rather, a conscious decision taken by the Truman Administration, and followed by all succeeding administrations, is demonstrated by declassified documents, the most important of which is known as National Security Council Memorandum – 68. The economic results of this decision – which was clearly predicted at the outset by the authors – was:

a. To effectively siphon off an ever growing portion of the labor force and material goods necessary for the satisfaction of the national standard of living to an unproductive military buildout consistent with the goals of the Cold War, and,

b. As a result of this siphoning, to permanently embed Inflation in the prices of goods as the social cost of a rising mass of unproductively employed individuals and resources.

This should be included in the body of the page.Jehujehu (talk) 18:20, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

I have completely re-wrtten the IMPORTANCE section with the following - in line with my comments above:

In a society founded on social production, such as our own, working time is the sum quantity of time society spends on producing the material and non-material economic requirements of human life. Working time is the sum quantity of time society spends on producing the material and non-material economic requirements of human life.

The length of the social work week is a matter of concern because its length determines how great a portion of our lives will be spent involuntarily engaged in work, rather than in the voluntary exercise of our humanity, and the enjoyment produced by that exercise. Since work is an involuntary act, the length of the work week is important because people should not have to work more than is absolutely necessary.

Most industrialized nations legally mandate a maximum work week length of between 30 and 40 hours per week, and, require 3 to 5 weeks per year of vacation. However, the actual hours of work per week cannot fall below a certain minimum without compromising a nation’s ability to produce the basic material standards of living, and to re-produce these same conditions as its population and wants grows.

If the minimum number of hours a nation works is determined by the material requirements of its standard of living by contrast there is no upper limit on the number of hours, save the endurance of its members, provided a certain minimum, and ever increasing, number of individuals remain completely superfluous to the satisfaction of those material requirements. The additional hours of work required to materially support these unproductively employed members are simply added to work time of those productively employed in the society.

Further, given the progressive improvement in the productivity of a nation, and its efficiency in the employment of labor, at a certain point the productive employment of an increasing portion of its members becomes impossible within a given length of the work week. In such cases, these superfluous members must be employed unproductively, or the actual average work time must be reduced. Absent one of these solutions economic collapse is likely.

When, as in the United States since 1950, government legally mandates a work week which extends beyond the its necessary length, an increasing proportion of labor and resource employment begins to take the form of unproductive economic activity - activity which purpose adds no net material improvement to society, yet saddles the society with permanent inflation of prices of material goods.

Jehujehu (talk) 16:15, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

The work week in the United States

I have revised part of this section, to include both the improved concept of work time as social work time. I have also added how this concept, once applied, presents a much different picture of working time changes since 1950.

Of importance:

1. The role of NSC-68 in effectively extending the United States social work week by 250 percent since 1950. 2. The impact this extension on female labor force participation rates.

I will also be adding a section which will try to quantify the impact of the lengthening social work week on price since 1950.

Jehujehu (talk) 16:12, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

It's still unclear from the present article how NSC68 increased work hours themselves in the United States. If so much information (more than just a mention) on NSC-68 is going to be included in the article, the causal link needs to be much more explicit. Mxheil (talk) 14:35, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Hoping to offer a proposal for completely revising this article

I have tried to make several edits to the sections listed under this article, but I am increasingly feeling the entire article needs fundamental revision. For me, as a Marxist, the topic covered here is a critical piece for understanding the entirety of the distinction between political-economy and the Marxist perspectives.

I understand that there will be many who will disagree with the viewpoint of Marxism on this subject, but I still hope we can at least approach it cooperatively - detailing, as necessary, where contending viewpoints diverge.

To take one: Individual versus collective working time. This may seem to some a difference of small import, but, without understanding why the Marxist perspective requires a focus on the collective measurement of working time, as opposed to individual working time, little progress can be made to understand the pathology inherent in the current, wholly excessive, maximum work week legally mandated in every industrialized nation today.

I would welcome the opportunity to cooperate with others - without regard to philosophical differences - in making this article unique and fascinating project.

Jehujehu (talk) 20:53, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia. Unfortunately, you seem to have mistaken this article for some other topic. Working time, for an individual, is the time that person spends doing whatever that person chooses to call work. Whether or not that "work" is self-contained or would be worthless in isolation from others, or is paid or unpaid, or anything else, does not change the fact that this article is about the time spent working.

I invite you to consider Wikipedia's policy about presenting material from a neutral, non-ideological perspective and the requirement for all statements to be verifiable and supported by reliable and independent sources (i.e., a newspaper article, a textbook or a scholarly article, not the marxists.org website). Compliance with these policies is mandatory. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:34, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

sources

"# ^ (Compiled from various sources[specify] by Juliet B. Schor; Germany figure from OECD data[citation needed])"

sorry, but that is not a source thats bullshit... if noone has a real source for this data is must be deleted :-( —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.173.163.7 (talk) 13:19, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Difference among countries chart: Poland

The chart in the "differences among countries" section shows the interesting fact that Polish people worked (2002 figures) more hours than any other OECD country, with the exception of South Korea. Anecdotally and completely nonscientifically, this seems to tally with the long work hours that I see here in Poland. But the source referred to in the caption (OECD (2004), OECD in Figures, OECD, Paris. [1]) does not contain any information about Poland. I don't know why this should be, but more importantly, where does the Polish data come from? Do we even know that the figure of 1984 hours/annum is not pure fantasy? Or that it's from a methodologically comparable study?

And while we're at it, does anyone know of more recent data on this? A lot has happened in eight years, politically and economically, in many of the countries shown. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ataltane (talk • contribs) 00:00, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Working hours in Poland

Polish employees work 5 days a week 8h a day. Each employee is entitled to 20 or 26 days of holidays. An employee advances from 20 to 26 days of holidays after 10 years of employment. However, formal education of second and higher levels is also regarded as "employment" so almost all employees are entitled to 26 days of holidays after 2-7 years of "real" employment. An employee can not resign the holidays he is entitled to. There are also 12* days of public holidays. Working time per year is (in most cases): (52*5-12-26) * 8 = 1776 (52 weeks a year, 5 days a week, minus 12 days of public holidays, minus 26 days of holidays times 8h per day) The number of hours on the chart seems to disregard holidays and take into account public holidays only: 248*8=1984

• number of public holidays used to be fixed because if a holiday fell on weekend employees were entitled to compensate for this on another day. This is due to change from 2011. There will be no compensation and number of holidays will vary each year.

Reference: http://www.pip.gov.pl/html/pl/doc/euro_en.pdf

More detailed information (in Polish): http://www.pip.gov.pl/html/pl/doc/k0000007.pdf http://www.pip.gov.pl/html/pl/html/03030006.htm —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.221.190.171 (talk) 00:34, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Average Work Week

"Assuming each individual worked a 1987 average work week of 1949 hours....." Wow! Do Americans work in something like 12 dimensions? The total number of hours in a week is 168. Yet another badly written Wikipedia article.Shemp Howard, Jr. (talk) 23:16, 9 July 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the edit this page link at the top. The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to).

In particular, if you want the sentence to report weekly figures rather than the annual total (whose advantage is its approach to seasonal labor), then you should feel free to simply fix that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:30, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

Source for "Annual hours" table

I have removed the overall reference given for the table "Annual hours over eight centuries" because it is not a proper citation. It claims to be a compilation by Juliet B. Schor from "various sources", but it does not state what publication compiles this information, which makes it unverifiable. Given that the basic information was added in June 2005, with little but formatting updates since then, I expect that any attempt to Google this information now will be more likely to produce publications that are quoting Wikipedia rather than the original, unnamed source. I've posted a note to Erauch, who added this extremely useful table, but until we get something citable, I've marked the entire section as needing better references. (There remains a challenge of how to cite the source(s), given that neither WP:TABLE nor WP:FOOT suggests how one should cite a source for an entire table that has no associated text or caption, and that the table has no borders, leaving the citation to float mysteriously on its own line, but we can address that problem after we get the stuff to cite.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:20, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

OECD Table Showing Annual Hours Worked

This is a misrepresentation of the data. From the source...

(you have to click on the "information" link on the left navigation bar for a definition)"The data are intended for comparisons of trends over time; they are unsuitable for comparisons of the level of average annual hours of work for a given year, because of differences in their sources."

Clearly it's clearly inappropriate when used to make the cross-country comparison that's being done here. I'm removing it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.158.175.78 (talk) 22:27, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

George F. Johnston?

The 'History' used to begin: "The man responsible for instituting the 40-hour-work-week is Massachusetts native of New York George F. Johnson, who announced that no American should have to work more than 40 hours per week. This announcement took effect as a rule on November 1, 1916 in the Endicott-Johnson factories.[4] Johnson had a philosophy to divide all his profits evenly between capital, owners, and workers. Forty hours, to him, represented the even division of a workers' time during the 5 days he gives his time for the production of goods."

This did not represent a global perspective, since the eight-hour day was suggested by Robert Owen in 1817, and first achieved by masons in Victoria in 1856.

So I deleted the section. If you wish to restore the material, please put it in its proper place in the 'USA' section. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Agemegos (talk • contribs) 02:40, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

"Decrease in staff working hours" Section

This section reads poorly. Example:

"An increase in number of people working part-time is also more evident as people realize that the internet allow people to work from their home and therefore allowing them to spend the desired time with the family, resulting in shorter work hours for the staff."

Secondly it is argued equally often that ICT has raised expectations of many employees to be 'always on' i.e. check their blackberry through evenings weekends and vacation time. Or at least people have begun to feel like they never leave the office.

Third, there are no citations. I imagine many sociologists have written on the subject, so these shouldn't be too difficult to find.

I propose to either remove this section or amend it to meet a reasonable level of quality. I would write it, but it is really not my field at all. 74.198.9.171 (talk) 03:45, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

An Improper Example of Industrializing Economy

"Working hours in industrializing economies like South Korea, though still much higher than the leading industrial countries, are also declining steadily."

This sentence appears pretty outdated. In terms of industrial structure and output, South Korea is one of the leading industrial countries rather than an industrializing economy. It's also incongruous with the statement in "Industrialisation" article that "In the case of South Korea, the largest of the four Asian tigers, a very fast paced industrialisation took place as it quickly moved away from the manufacturing of value-added goods in the 1950s and 60s into the more advanced steel, shipbuilding and automobile industry in the 1970s and 80s, focusing on the high-tech and service industry in the 1990s and 2000s. As a result, South Korea became a major economic power." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.116.130.36 (talk) 04:22, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Sick days, holidays in U.S.

re: this sentence: "However, regular, full-time workers often have the opportunity to take about nine days off for various holidays, two weeks of sick leave and two weeks of paid holiday time..." I don't believe this is accurate for the majority of workers in the U.S. For example, at Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer, you certainly don't get anywhere near nine days for holidays or 2 weeks for sick leave. I'd bet fewer than 30 percent of U.S. workers get those sort of benefits. This sort of thing might have been common back in the 1950s, when unions were strong. But today, you're lucky to get 2 or 3 sick days per year. And even then, many employers intimidate their workers into not taking sick days. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.11.223.18 (talk) 11:30, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

"Points in favor of and against Standard Working Hours" - unbalanced

The following points in the "Against" section of "Points in favor of and against Standard Working Hours" are not explained. The whole table seems improperly cited.

Unemployment (Unemployment should go DOWN with people working fewer hours, because employers will need to hire more) Extend retirement age, the lifelong work hour may not change Standard working hour is not a good measure to achieve work-life balance (Why?) Problem in calculating work time may cause dispute between employers and employees (Why?) 184.166.6.102 (talk) 19:37, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Rewrite to Avoid Pro and Con List

As part of Wikipedia's neutral tone policiy, tables featuring pros and cons are suggested to be avoided. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pro_and_con_lists for more details. This article could use a restructuring that removes the table and incorporates relevant information into the article properly. 121.99.60.155 (talk) 10:08, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

10 days holiday time in US?

This is actually a myth - the average is closer to 17. Unless you have a stingy employer, 10 days is usually reserved only for probationary employees or the first 2 years max. In some industries like health care, 20 days for vacation and 5 for sick leave is not uncommon. Wikipedia should be based on fact not popular perception, let alone reinforce incorrect popular perceptions. 12.0.70.131 (talk) 23:50, 20 August 2014 (UTC)